Responsibility within the Community

Shoftim 5777 / 26 August 2017

Shabbat shalom.

I want to look at the last lines of this week’s parashah:

“If, in the land that the LORD your God is assigning you to possess, someone slain is found lying in the open, the identity of the slayer not being known, (2) your elders and magistrates shall go out and measure the distances from the corpse to the nearby towns. (3) The elders of the town nearest to the corpse shall then take a heifer which has never been worked, which has never pulled in a yoke; (4) and the elders of that town shall bring the heifer down to an everflowing wadi, which is not tilled or sown. There, in the wadi, they shall break the heifer’s neck. (5) The priests, sons of Levi, shall come forward; for the LORD your God has chosen them to minister to Him and to pronounce blessing in the name of the LORD, and every lawsuit and case of assault is subject to their ruling. (6) Then all the elders of the town nearest to the corpse shall wash their hands over the heifer whose neck was broken in the wadi. (7) And they shall make this declaration: “Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it done. (8) Absolve, O LORD, Your people Israel whom You redeemed, and do not let guilt for the blood of the innocent remain among Your people Israel.” And they will be absolved of bloodguilt. (9) Thus you will remove from your midst guilt for the blood of the innocent, for you will be doing what is right in the sight of the LORD.”

• You don’t get absolved from guilt just because something didn’t happen inside your jurisdiction.
• The elders have to measure the distance to see what town is closest. There’s an assumption that we are responsible for things in our community.
  • Technically, the person could be an outsider from some far off place, but it’s much more likely that they are a local. We don’t assume that something extremely unlikely happened–we have to look at our own community, even if it feels unlikely.
• Once the right town is determined, those elders have to take responsibility for the murder. They have to take a valuable heifer and sacrifice it in the presence of others.
  • They have real work to do. Why? Because it was their community that somehow failed. There was someone in their community who needed help, and they didn’t provide it. They didn’t see what happened, but they know that they failed and they need to ask forgiveness for it.
• As we’re having a bigger national conversation about guilt, and racism, I think it’s useful to think of this mitzvah. This mitzvah assumes that you weren’t the one who committed the murder, but that doesn’t mean your community isn’t responsible for it. And if you want to absolve yourself and your community of this act of violence, you have to work for it. You have to examine how your community could have harbored a criminal, or ignored a victim. And you will have to sacrifice something valuable in a public way in order to make it right. You will have to dig deep into who you are, and how you behave.
• During Elul, this mitzvah seems especially resonant. We are all meant to be doing self-reflection and self-evaluation in preparation for Rosh Hashanah, the day of Judgement, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
• But there’s more here than just self-reflection. Elul is not supposed to be about navel gazing.
• Kitzur shulchan Aruch say that Elul is an acronym for Ish Lreieihu v’matanot l’evyonim, a line from Esther, “Each person to their neighbor, and gifts for the poor.”
• This is really the crux of Elul: the idea that we need to spend this time reaching out to others, to the people who are geographically close to us, our literal neighbors, and giving gifts to the poor. These are specific mitzvot for Purim, but I think they’re also the key to Elul.
• By connecting with our community, and giving tzedakah to people in need, we are helping to create a community that is strong and supported. We are working to keep anyone else from being an anonymous corpse left in a field. And we are helping to heal the wounds that already exist in our communities, whether or not we are personally responsible for them.
• On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur we say that teshuva, repentance, tefila, prayer, and tzedakah, charity, can diminish the severity of God’s decree against us. This parashah helps us to think about ways that we might do our own teshuva for systemic evils that we are a part of. And by doing acts of chesed and giving tzedakah during Elul we are able to make elevate our teshuva to a systemic level, creating connected communities, and paying attention to the suffering of our neighbors.
• Shabbat shalom!

 

Tags: community, High Holy Days, tefila, teshuva, Tzedakah